Dirty White Boys (31 page)

He could have pounced at any second, and in his mind he thrilled at the prospect of it. That was what he was addicted to: the hot fun of the violence. He saw himself really getting his weight into it and bringing that blade whanging down into the trooper’s bull neck. What a wound it would open! The meat would splay open, red and pulsing, maybe a sliver of bone would show. There’d be more goddamned blood than you could shake a stick at. Pewtie would turn, stunned, unbelieving, and his eyes would lock onto Lamar’s and beg for mercy, and he’d weakly raise his hands, but Lamar, with his great iron-pumper’s strength, would bring the ax down again and again in a rain of killing blows. It excited Lamar. He wanted to do it so bad!

They paused to gab a bit at her workbench, and the cop said something that Lamar didn’t catch. But when the cop started to examine the car, Lamar slid through the darkness
and got almost within spitting distance. He could lunge out now at any instant and take the man down. His hand tightened and loosened on the ax shaft and he tried to control his excitement and think through the red rage that clouded his brain so that he could figure out the right thing. Hell, maybe he should just do it and to hell with it.

But he waited.

“Hah,” said Bud.

He stood up, a little disappointed. The old, once-red Tercel lay blistering in the sun. Its plaid interior had faded, and was anyway jammed with blankets. Spots of rust flaked the left rear fender, and the rear bumper also looked rotted out a bit.

Then he leaned back again, looking at the escutcheon on the old tire. Slowly he walked around, one by one, looking at them.

Nope! Goddammit, nope.

The tires were old, all right, but they were Bridgestones, not Goodyears.

For some reason, he’d just had a suspicion this one might be the one, the woman’s nervousness, the isolation, the anomalies of the TV and the hard male work put into the place.

“Well, thanks very much, Miss Tull. I see I can scratch your name off the list. No ma’am, I don’t believe you shot up any Denny’s restaurants lately.”

“Not in this lifetime, at any rate,” she said with a little laugh.

Bud disengaged abruptly from the situation. It was of no more interest to him.

“Well, I’ll be getting out of your hair now. Have to get over to Granite.”

“Sure, Mr. Pewtie. Now, I can’t interest you in one of them pots?”

Bud looked back. One of them really did leap out at him: ocher glaze, black diagonals, and a bright orange sunburst, like the end of a world.

“Could you sell me one?”

“I get fifteen dollars for the small ones and twenty-five for the big ones.”

Ouch! Not cheap.

“But I’ll tell you what. Your choice, ten bucks.”

“Hell, that’s a bargain if ever I heard of one.”

Fortunately the pot he chose wasn’t a big one, so he forked over the ten without feeling terribly greedy. He didn’t as a rule like to take little extras with the badge but hell … once in a while didn’t hurt a thing.

She fetched the pot, brought it to him, and the two of them walked back through the barn to his truck.

“Come on back,” she said. “I enjoy visitors.”

“Thanks, Miss Tull. Good luck to you.”

He got in.

Now if they were just lucky a little bit longer. If Odell or Richard didn’t come walking out of the house.

Lamar watched from the pool of shadow behind the barn door. His heart was thumping. Pewtie was too far away to get with the ax now. It was in the hands of God.

He diddled with the car a bit, picked up his radio, and called in what Lamar assumed was his 10-24—task completed—and then with majestic leisure started the truck. It took him another minute to back out of the yard and then three more minutes to pull down the dirt road to the macadam, take a left, and then disappear.

There seemed to be a long pause in the day. Lamar found that he was doused with sweat. Unlike the race out of
Denny’s he didn’t feel exhilaration; he just felt the total numbing meltdown of shock that attends survivors of near-death experiences. He didn’t like it a bit.

He looked up. Ruta Beth came out of the house, almost in a daze. She cupped her hands as if she were about to call to him.

“No,” he said, loud, but not a shout. “Don’t call. Don’t look left or right. Just mosey into the barn, in case.”

At that moment Odell opened the door, looked out in confusion.

“Odell, stay where you are. No, wait—and make sure the shotguns is loaded. Keep Richard in the house.”

Odell nodded and ducked back in.

Eventually, Ruta Beth came on over.

“You was in the barn the whole time.”

“I was. One silly move out of that boy and I’d have cut him open with this ax.”

“He had two guns. I saw them both. One under his coat, the other in his belt.”

“Probably had more, goddamn,” said Lamar. “That boy was loaded for bear. The car. It was the car he wanted to see, honey?”

“Yes it was, Daddy.”

“Tell me
’xactly
what he asked.
’Xactly
. I have to know the words.”

Numbly, Ruta Beth reiterated Bud’s explanation.

“I see,” said Lamar, concentrating mightily. “He said he had to ‘check it off.’ They still use that old one?”

“That’s what he said, Daddy.”

“Now, honey, you think real hard. Tell me the whole talk. Not just what he said, but what you said. I have to know if you said something that gave too much away and a sly old dog like him might sniff it out.”

Laboriously, she recreated the conversation, now and
then prodded by Lamar’s insistent probing. It went on for ten minutes. But then she said, “I tried hard, Lamar. I didn’t do nothing on purpose.”

“Honey, you done great. See, he caught us in a mistake. We should have stories prepared. Last thing you ever want to do is try and be making stuff up as you go along. Trip up too easy. No ma’am, got to have your story straight up front, got to have it worked out and tested, that’s how you do that kind of work. Goddamn, Ruta Beth, I must say, you got to be some kind of
natural
at that kind of work.”

“Have you figured it out? Why he was here?”

Lamar thought a little harder, and then he had it.

“Tires,” he said. “That was soft dust this side of the Red. Sure enough we left tracks in it. They must have got a good tire print and the F-fucking-B-I done ’em the models of cars them tires could fit. So they’re just wading through the DMV listings, hoping to turn up the right car with the right tires and the right fucking boys. They’re so goddamn worried, they even got old Bud Pewtie, his hide so full of buckshot still he can’t hardly walk, out doing shitbird work.”

He was laughing now. He saw the joke in it.

Ruta Beth stared at him in horror.

“But Lamar,” she said. “They was right. I got them tires two years ago when they was marked down because the tire place said Goodyear had discontinued the line and they just wanted to reduce inventory.”

“Not
them
tires, no ma’am. Night of the party, I went out, remember? Goddamn, I got to thinking about the ways we could slip up and only one I hadn’t covered was the goddamn tires. I swapped ’em with Bridgestones I lifted off a Hyundai Excel. Hah! Old Bud Pewtie thinks he’s so goddamn smart. He ain’t as smart as no Lamar Pye.”

O
n the final day, Bud tried to make it last longer. He dawdled, he examined each car with microscopic attention, he wouldn’t disengage from conversations, he just let it drift. But still it ended. He pulled down the driveway of a farm all the way over near Healdton in Jefferson County. The sun was a huge pink balloon sinking through wavering atmospheric phenomenon, and the twilight was still and windless. He looked each way as he pulled onto the road, and saw the black band of the highway stretching in a straight shot toward a blank horizon.

Okay, that’s it
.

“Dispatch, six-oh-five, do you copy?”

“Six-oh-five, over. What’s your situation?”

“Ten-twenty-four on the O’Brian location.”

“Nothing to report, Bud?”

“No, Dispatch. Nada, zilch, negative. Anybody get anything?”

“That’s a big negative, six-oh-five. Lots of disappointment at this end. Best git yourself home now, Bud.”

“Thanks, Dispatch. Ten-four and out.”

Bud clicked the radio off. In two weeks he’d gotten to
know Dispatch a little, a retired Tillman deputy sheriff, another good old boy like himself, steady and salty. In a sense he wanted to please Dispatch as much as himself or Lt. C. D. Henderson or Colonel Supenski. But it wasn’t to be. The joint task force, in two weeks, had called on close to four thousand addresses in the Southern Oklahoma region, and located close to four thousand Toyota Tercels, Hyundai Excels, and Nissan Sentras in the proper model years. Of these, over eight hundred had worn the Goodyear tires; each owner had been investigated and either cleared or interviewed at length. Some fourteen were put under surveillance, which had itself yielded nothing. Meanwhile, joint Highway Patrol-OSBI raiding teams had entered the domiciles of close to two hundred former or currently wanted felons who owned the proper car. Again, nothing, although the lieutenant himself said they’d served warrants on and apprehended over twenty-eight fugitives from justice in the process.

Bud himself had been to over 230 domiciles in the past two weeks, working twelve, fourteen, and sometimes sixteen hours a day, roaming the back country roads of the southernmost five counties. Some nights he hadn’t even come home but had checked into truck-stop motels for a few hours’ ragged sleep, and one night he’d just climbed into a sleeping bag and slept under the shelter of the open tailgate. Oddly, it had been his best sleep.

He tried to think it all over as he headed back to Lawton, to turn in the radio and see what the hell to do next, if there was a next. Goddamn Lamar, smart as a whip. All them brains spent on defeating the law, and completely unyoked to any moral compass. He could have been a doctor, a goddamned lawyer, with brains like that. But he spent all that time just figuring out one thing: how to get away with it. He wasn’t your “criminal genius,” like the movies had
it, sleek and cosmopolitan with a taste for fine wine, and maybe his IQ wasn’t the kind that tests could measure. But he was a smart boy.

Tiredly, he turned on the AM radio to KTOK, the Oklahoma City all-news station, and listened to the numb recitation of the world and the region’s events, from what the president had done on down to what happened in the Oklahoma City council that day.

And soon enough, he got the bad news.

“In Lawton, highway patrol and OSBI authorities today called off a statewide dragnet for the car they believed was used by escaped convict Lamar Pye and his gang in the May 16 robbery and shooting spree in Wichita Falls, Texas, which left four law enforcement officers and two civilians dead.”

We’ll
just have to wait for you to strike again, Lamar
, Bud thought.
And this time, I know you’ll
make a goddamned splash and a half

“In a related development, Lawton school officials revealed today that a Lamar Pye ‘cult’ appears to be growing and gaining strength in Lawton high schools, elevating the escaped convict and armed robber into a folk hero. At Lawton West last night, vandals defaced the school gym with ‘Long Live Lamar’ and ‘Go Lamar’ graffiti. Superintendent Will C. Long said—” The superintendent’s voice came on the air: “It’s a symptom of the moral limbo in which all too many of our children are raised that some of them would consider a Lamar Pye a hero.”

Shit!

That really got to Bud!

It was like these goddamned kids today. They thought it was funny or cool when somebody stood over a poor policeman and blew his brains out or caught him coming out
of the men’s room with his hands wet and blew him away with a blast of double-ought.

The news put Bud in a black funk, a near rage. It made him wish he was a drinking man still, and he felt like pulling over to the next bar he found and chasing his anger away.

Instead, he drove on as the darkness increased, changing to a C-W station, whose jangly rhythms soothed him some. And then he knew he had to call Holly again. It just came like that and he didn’t bother to fight it at all.

He found a pay phone by a convenience store the other side of Oil City. He had to call collect because he didn’t have enough change.

“Well, howdy, stranger,” she said. “I thought you’d dropped off the earth.”

“Been looking at three-year-old Toyotas, just like a real detective. How are you?”

“Bud, I’m okay. How’re you?”

“Honey, I’m outta Toyotas, that’s how I am, and I’m missing you something kind of bad.”

“A likely story.”

“Only the truth.”

“You ain’t had sex in awhile. That’s what it is.”

“No ma’am, that ain’t what it is. I miss Holly. She’s a peach. Now I don’t think I’m gonna be doing a thing tomorrow. You and me were going to look at places.”

“Oh, Bud. I thought you’d forgot.”

“No ma’am. Be over ’round ten.”

“Bud, I was looking through the want ads. I found a house to rent. I want you to see it so bad.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“Oh, Bud, I love you so much!”

Now why did I go do that
, he said to himself when he hung up.
Back in It all over again
.

*  *  *

Bud woke the next morning to a dilemma: since he was only going house hunting with Holly, did he need his three guns? The answer seemed clear but wasn’t. It might seem to be “No.” But if he didn’t put the guns on, then Jen would surely know he wasn’t headed off on police business. Still, the prospect of walking into strangers’ houses with a smile on his face and three automatic pistols on him wasn’t pleasing either.

That’s how it was. In this business you were always thinking, figuring angles, trying to work your way two or three jumps ahead. You always had your lies prepared up front because you didn’t want to improvise under pressure, where you’d surely start contradicting yourself and anyone with half a brain could unravel your tale. It was like living in enemy territory all the time.